Coming Soon
•
Coming Soon •
A Book About Women—And Everyone Else
Despite its title, Naked Women is not a polemic about gender. Durham is quick to say that she hopes men will read the book, too.
“I’d like them to feel relaxed,” she says. “Not threatened.”
She has spent a lifetime observing both sexes with equal curiosity. Men, she believes, often struggle with their own vulnerabilities when it comes to engaging with women.
The book offers no lectures about that dynamic. Instead, it simply presents women thinking honestly about their lives.
Smart readers—male or female—may find that fascinating.
Pull Up a Chair
Ask Durham what she hopes readers will feel after finishing the book, and she pauses for a moment.
Then she smiles.
“I’d like to share a meal with her,” she says, imagining the reader speaking about the narrator.
That response, she believes, would mean the book succeeded.
Not because it impressed anyone. Not because it instructed them.
But because it opened a conversation.
Durham imagines a dinner table after the last page is turned: a few thoughtful people, maybe a glass of wine, questions drifting across the table.
Someone says, “Your story reminds me of something that happened to me…”
And then the stories begin.
If Naked Women works the way Durham hopes, the conversation will keep going long after the book itself ends.
Which, in her view, is exactly the point.
The Women Inside One Woman
At the center of Naked Women are four imagined figures: Clara, Barbara, Lola, and Shirley.
They are not fictional characters in the conventional sense. They are, as Durham describes them, “alt-women”—the lives she might have lived if certain choices had gone differently.
Clara is the scholar.
Barbara the dutiful wife.
Lola the sensual wanderer.
Shirley a waitress in Amarillo who lives a simpler, quieter life.
Each represents a path Durham glimpsed but never took.
The effect is less like reading a traditional memoir than like watching a prism turn slowly in the light. Each angle reveals a slightly different Linda Durham, a new possibility nested inside the life she actually lived.
Most memoirs try to present a coherent identity. Durham does the opposite. She treats identity as an open field—one life threaded with many potential selves.
“I continue to recognize who I am,” she says, “but more keeps showing up.”
The Tone of Curiosity
If Durham’s work has a central theme, it may not be travel or art or even identity. It may simply be curiosity.
As a child, she invented elaborate stories. As a gallery owner, she spent decades exploring artists’ imaginations. As a traveler, she crossed continents alone, meeting strangers and collecting experiences from places most people will never see.
Now, as a writer in her eighties, she remains—by her own description—“comfortably uncomfortable and still curious.”
That curiosity shapes the tone of Naked Women. The book never pretends to deliver final wisdom. Instead, it moves through layers of truth: public life, imagined life, and the observing consciousness that watches them both.
Time itself becomes a character in the narrative—sometimes companion, sometimes teacher, occasionally trickster.
Durham doesn’t claim to have solved life. She’s simply looking at it closely.
The Many Lives of Linda Durham
Inside the curiosity, candor, and quiet courage behind Naked Women
Some books try to answer life’s big questions. Linda Durham’s forthcoming memoir, Naked Women, does something more interesting: it asks them out loud, in public, with curiosity, humor, and an unusual willingness to stand there—metaphorically speaking—without clothes.
The title invites a raised eyebrow. But the nakedness Durham has in mind is not physical. It is existential. Emotional. Imaginative. The kind that appears when a person stops smoothing over the complicated parts of a life and says: This is who I’ve been. These are the lives I’ve lived—and the ones I didn’t.
Durham, a longtime Santa Fe gallery owner and writer, is no stranger to reinvention. For more than three decades, she ran a respected contemporary art gallery in New Mexico, moving comfortably in the orbit of artists, collectors, and curators. Then, after that chapter of her life closed, she did something less predictable: she began traveling the world alone.
That period became her first memoir, Still Moving, a quietly admired account of global wandering, personal upheaval, and the search for identity after a life-defining role disappears. Readers responded strongly. Many wrote to Durham not about the travel itself but about what the book gave them.
“Courage,” they said.
Durham seems amused by that word now. She has never thought of herself as heroic. Curious, yes. Restless, certainly. But courage? That feels a little grand.
Still, courage is one way to describe what happens in Naked Women, the book she has been writing in recent years—a work that moves inward rather than outward, examining the many versions of a life that might have unfolded.
No Final Answer
One of the more unusual aspects of Naked Women is its ending.
Durham has no interest in tidy conclusions. The book does not arrive at a moral or a philosophical full stop.
“No ‘THE END,’” she says.
Life continues to contain wisdom and foolishness, courage and hesitation, clarity and confusion. Durham embraces that mixture rather than resolving it.
The final note she aims for is something she calls “embraceable”—savvy, reassuring, and open to whatever comes next.